What Is Competitive Analysis and What Does It Mean for Your Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing consists of more than your businesses own practices. Get to know what your competitors are doing and you may open the door to a wealth of helpful information.

A competitive analysis can jumpstart your digital marketing initiatives. Understanding what your competition is doing can help you identify areas where your strategy is lacking. This will enable you to improve search results and stay one step ahead.

So, what is competitive analysis? How is the data gathered? And what should you do once you have it?

Read on to find out!

What Is Competitive Analysis?

Successful digital marketing is comprised of content marketing and SEO best practices. However, if all these best practices consist of You, Yourself, and I, you’re missing out on a wealth of helpful information.

The first step towards a successful competitive analysis is identifying your goals. How are you going to use the information? Do you want to improve your branding, increase search traffic, or increase your social following?

Knowing what your goal is will help you determine what competitor data to collect. There’s a never-ending source of data to pull from, but a few of the most popular are:

Social profiles, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn

If you haven’t already, identify your competition. Understanding what your competition is up to can help you identify areas of opportunity in your own business.

Identifying your competitors is a little more difficult than it may seem. If you need some assistance, tools like SEMrush can help you find your top 10 competitors based on products or services.

Finally, you need to collect your competitor’s data. The best method for data collection is to use a variety of tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, SEMrush, and RankWatch.

If you’re interested in more platform-specific tools, the platform itself often has its own helpful tools, like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics.

Understanding the Analysis

Once you have the competitive analysis, you may not know what to do with it.

To begin properly using your data, you must first analyze it. There are a few metric points to identify key areas of performance that can then be compared to your own data.

For example, if your businesses goal is to generate more traffic via search engines, check out your competitor’s Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. This will include their traffic volume, authority ranking, and amount of backlinks.

Consult helpful tools to make data collection and analysis easier on your team. Tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and SEMrush have built-in tools and customizable dashboards.

Finding Your Digital Marketing Success

So, what is competitive analysis?

Now that you know what these reports are and how they can help your business, put them into practice! Stay one step ahead of the competition by seeing how they compare to your own website.

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SimpleLogic is a web design agency in Louisville, KY. We specialize in crafting effective digital marketing strategies that generate demand, leads and sales from your website. Our goal is to simplify the digital marketing experience. If your website is not generating the results your business needs to grow, please give us a call at (502) 230-6690 or Contact Us here.